Part of the difficulty and sensitivity of working with Human Data is protecting the privacy of the individuals that data represents. The most important principle to remember is that if you do not need to be processing personally identifiable information (PII), then don’t. When the nature of the analysis does require you to work with this type of data, it needs to be anonymized. In this piece, I will take a look at some techniques…

The United Nations’ Global Pulse initiative is partnering with DataSift to analyze worldwide opinions on vaccinations, poverty and other humanitarian topics. Here’s how they do it. Do Kenyans tweet more about education or healthcare? Do people in Venezuela complain about government corruption, or talk more about the need for affordable food? These are just some of the questions The United Nations’ Global Pulse initiative is trying to answer with DataSift. The results are being fed into an ongoing process to identify…

The privacy environment is heating up. Its theme in 2015 could simply be “watch this space,” but I’ll flesh that out a little more. I see three areas that could well affect your data programs into the new year and beyond: New default settings on consumer oriented devices. In the past, security has not been the default for consumer devices. Encryption was turned off. SSL was an option you could enable, but it was not required. Passwords were not enabled right out of…

WordPress is the perfect place to pitch your online tent. In fact, this online publishing platform now powers 23% of the entire Internet. It’s a big claim backed by big stats: more than 409 million people view more than 15.5 billion pages each month, and WordPress users publish about 41.7 million new posts and leave 60.5 million new comments each month. One thing’s for certain: organizations can’t afford to ignore WordPress as part of their social data strategy. Here’s the…

Last week Facebook and Datasift announced the release of topic data, a new way for brands to understand their audiences through their Facebook activity. Today, Francesco Dorazio of Pulsar, a researcher and designer with a social science and digital media background discusses why Facebook topic data is a big deal for the marketing industry. Facebook topic data, which can be tapped into through Datasift’s new product PYLON, analyzes what 1.39 billion people are talking about on the platform and…

In the second of the three-part series, we reveal how content analytics can help even very small analytics team make sense of mountains of Human Data. Astronomers have just discovered a huge and ancient black hole at the edge of our universe. According to BBC News, it is smaller than an atom, but contains as much material as 12 thousand million (12 billion) stars—some the size of the sun. Now, this is a humble DataSift blog, not an astrophysics lesson, so…

In my last blog we looked at how PYLON works and how developers can use it to create insights from the billions of posts and engagements that take place every day on Facebook. Getting insights from topic data Now that you know the basics of how PYLON works with Facebook topic data, we’ll look at what you can do with it. Your index will contain what your target audiences are saying on Facebook about your…

In the first of the three-part series, we reveal how Human Data can be turned from a minefield into a field of dreams. One day we might drop by our local Best Buy store and pick up a one zettabyte memory stick. But not just yet. Right now a zettabyte—that’s one trillion gigabytes to you and I—is limited to discussions about Big Data. Very, very Big Data in fact. Like Human Data. This is the billions of pictures,…

On March,10th we announced our partnership with Facebook and the availability of “Facebook topic data”. With Facebook topic data, marketers have new ways to research and understand what audiences on Facebook are talking about – helping them create better content, ads and marketing campaigns. Insights are provided in aggregate and are anonymized. This ensures that the identity of people is protected while providing insights into audiences and engagement on Facebook. Here in this first blog…

In the next three to five years, the brands that emerge as winners in every market and category will be the ones that best harness the data that consumers generate – Human Data. Human Data is everywhere. Thoughts and feelings and opinions expressed in news articles, via social media, within company documents and on blogs, among many other places. Collectively, it’s Big Data. Really Big Data. And hidden within it are gems of information that…